I’ve been having a crisis of blogs recently… which has manifested itself into a new avatar and “WordPress nickname”. But I’ve also started two other blogs, one for photos and commentary, the other to excercise my humour muscles. In the meantime I’ve been letting CSN:AFU slide, and it just hit me yesterday why I’ve been having such an identity crisis…

CSN:AFU has been gradually turning into a textbook. And I don’t want to write a textbook. And I certainly want to avoid becoming a “Daily Reporter.” I’ve never had the stamina, or the discipline. As a daily reporter it takes a lot of energy to write 800-1000 words every day on specific topics. Done properly it’s ten phone interviews to get three to four sources. As a blogger I generally use ten to thirty websites for my “features”, plus a couple of books or magazines and maybe a PBS special. The “Monday News” things alone are six hour posts. Writing these things involves three or four drafts and — in general — it takes twice as many words in notes to find the ones worth printing. And there’s no paycheque at the end of my week. Plus there’s all the drinking, and the groupies and the coke associated with news blogging, and really, I just don’t have the energy for blow and hooker binges anymore.

So CSN:AFU, to me, was meant to be two or three stories a week, plus my little Monday News Recap. But I haven’t got the discipline right now to be writing serious pieces aboot abortion, native rights, inventions, books, people and general poltics every week, so CSN:AFU became this weird place to write news briefs… and only news briefs. So I’m taking my New, Improved Photo Blog, and smashing it into CSN:AFU. This will give me the opportunity to write short, simple and interesting posts aboot things that are somewhat more personal to me in between writing aboot Canadian stuff.

So RIP ‘Photo Graphic F.T.S’. The posts and comments will be moved from There to Here. I’m not sure aboot “Dumb Waiter… I think I’m still going to give it a shot. I want to keep CSN:AFU totally Canadian, and Salted completely aboot my recovery, so Dumb Waiter will probably stay seperate. Hopefully this will let me post here a lot more often… basically, I need something to do here between the energy bursts which lead to the Features. C’est ca.

I don’t know, this week seemed to blow by… pretty quickly. I spent so much time dicking around with my eighty-three blogs I forgot to get outside. I did start walking again, I’m going to take it slowly. I’ve been out three times for 1.5 miles each time. My knee was freaking sore. When I was 18 I dislocated my kneecap and tore my ACL almost entirely, and damaged my MCL playing midnight basketball in the playground. I walked with a cane for almost three years, and a brace for most of that as well. Surgery helped a little. Last year I was up to five miles a night, I figure by the end of the month I’ll be up there again.

I did finally get to a working scale, and it turns out I’ve lost 15 pounds since I started this new healthy diet thing. The Village Fair was this weekend, I took photos of the Parade, but didn’t go to the actual Event… and what else… of yeah, I helped my step-father get the trusses up for the roof on his new garage. He’s an architect, actually a VP with the second largest architectual firm on Earth. Right now he’s helping build a brand-spanking new city in Saudi Arabia. I’ve worked on a lot of projects around Ontario, but I’ve never seen anyone better with a hammer or with a better sense as to how things work than he does.

This garage project, and the other ones around town that he has done, are what he does on vacation. I helped — a little — but the Musuem Project was 80% entirely him… I’ll post the photos sometime this week. It’s an amazing renovation project. It took him aboot six years to get it done. The Garage Project will be done next spring. We should have the plywood done next weekend. Just to give you an idea… he put the first four trusses on himself. I’ve never seen anyone do that alone.

And that’s it. His mother, my step-granny, turns 73 tomorrow so we’re going out for brunch. I’ll probably have some of the local chedder and a bagel.

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About Gabriel

I’ve lived in fifty-two places. I've been paid to pick stones out of fields, take backstage photos of Britney Spears, and report on Internet privacy issues. My photos have been published in several newspapers, and a couple of magazines.

3 Responses to CSN:AFU Week 27 In Review

You have been at several avatars of late, but I quite liked the Gabriel one. I mean, I liked FTS too, but well, I guess Gabriel is more real. Who is more real to you?
Its a good thing you are so clear as to why you write a blog…I feel most people aren’t.

Diluting the brand… I had thought aboot that for a few seconds when I restarted FTS, which was kind of the problem — I was thinking of CSN:AFU as an “all and nothing” site. All aboot Canada and nothing aboot me.

When I started blogging — and I’m getting sick of writing that as I’m sure people are of reading it — Salted was the recovery blog and FTS was the “practicing to be a reporter again” blog. But I wanted to take it a bit slower and be more fun… so CSN:AFU let me do that. But “in between” pieces was a whole lotta empty space. So this format I hope will work for me…

The avatar and nickname thing… as much as I love “feartheseeds” there were times when I was posting responses when I felt like I was wearing a mask, and occasionally I was putting on an act. I haven’t gotten into an argument or discussion yet in here with Gabriel… but it’ll be interesting when I do because I really don’t like it when people pull my name out in the middle of a fight. Out in the real world it kind of pisses me off. So there’s a possibility I may change it again in the near future. I hope not to though.

When I started blogging I did so for very specific reasons which haven’t changed. CSN:AFU and Salted are my attempts to get back some normalcy in my life. And I’ve tried to be as honest as possible on both, to me the alternative seems counterproductive to my recovery.

DR: I’ve mentioned “Dead Robot” a few times in here, but it looks like they found CSN:AFU via my “Gay Anglican” post, to which you were kind enough to respond. Weird they’d scroll past the actual DR site though. And that they’d be so insistent, angry even (“Dead Robot” AND gay), aboot your gayiness.